Editorial: The Gendered Impact of COVID-19: Communicating Risks, Hope, Opportunities, and Challenges

Satarupa Dasgupta^1*Sudeshna Roy²Marissa Joanna Doshi^3*Ruma Sen^1*

• ¹Ramapo College, Mahwah, United States
• ²Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
• ³Hope College, Holland, Michigan, United States

crisis response and the potential of digital platforms to fill communication gaps when institutional responses fail. It underscores that effective pandemic communication must acknowledge differential impacts across genders and utilize diverse channels to reach vulnerable populations. Most importantly, the authors emphasize that advocacy attention must persist beyond the pandemic's acute phase.Saxena et al.'s research provides insight into the gendered impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on family life. Specifically, their study explored the impact on family routines and stress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their study affirms that during lockdowns, women shouldered the majority of family-related tasks, including household duties and care-giving, which may have contributed to increased mental stress. In short, the lockdowns exacerbated the already gendered toll of household labor. While the female participants in their study adapted positively to these disruptions (i.e., they perceived changes in routines positively), the authors caution that long periods of high stress and intense caregiving without time for personal self-care and rest can lead to compassion fatigue and other adverse outcomes. Further, they found that women and men had different negative emotional responses to the lockdowns, with men being angrier than women. Although their study is exploratory in nature and their sample size is modest, their findings point to the heightened need for exploring if disruptions of family routines and resultant anger can lead to an increase in domestic violence, a phenomenon that was reported by multiple sources during the lockdown. Ultimately, this research underscores the need for systemic support and complex interventions that take into account gendered differences in stress responses, particularly in times of major disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic. Priya Kapoor's work involves studying the meaning of citizenship in contemporary India through a partial, yet multi-perspectival view of the protest movement of Shaheen Bagh, culled from select readings on the movement. Through an examination of "expert musings" by four prominent academics, public scholars and thinkers, along with a re-telling of the stories of the embodied voices from the protest ground, this paper reflects on the contemporary discourse on citizenship in a critical moment in the global South COVID-19 landscape, along with documenting an important disruption in the constitutional history of contemporary India. The project highlights the confluence of vigilante citizenship and citizen-led protest against the backdrop of the Indian state's imposition of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the COVID-19 pandemic. In essence, the work is a testament to the history of dissenting Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh and their powerful dissent against the constitutionality of the citizenship laws passed by the current right-wing Indian government. By using the theoretical work of subaltern public intellectuals as framework to understand this particular local protest movement, Kapoor reinstates women's historical struggles into the canon of world history, politics, communication, and legal studies. As acknowledged by the author, this study is neither ethnographic, nor derived from primary data. Despite that, this essay is able to capture a crucial moment from the COVID-19 pandemic time in India through the re-telling of the ground realities as well as the summary analysis of the writing of prominent scholars and thinkers like Romila Thapar, N. Ram, Gautam Bhatia and Gautam Patel.To what extent are gendered disparities of COVID-19 felt across varied contexts--including vaccine uptake and hesitancy, domestic violence and digital activism, family routines and stress, and negotiating the meanings of citizenship of a subaltern population? The current special issue tries to answer these questions as well as identify solutions for a diverse group of women---often with intersectional and multiple marginalized identities---within the context of the pandemic.